More ST-V emulation progress
- Thread starter mal
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Probably because the MAME team tries to concentrate on accuracy instead of speed. If you look at some other games from the same era (Cruisin' USA for example) you'll see that they have insanely high requirements for a full framerate as well. Besides, most of the Saturn emulators out there require a fairly beefy PC to run well, and those probably take a lot more shortcuts (and can be optimized more for the specific hardware) than MAME.
The st-v emulation code is still in early dev phase.. let's hope they do some speed tweaks 
but as it290 said, MAME points to perfect emulation, not to the fastest emulation..
but as it290 said, MAME points to perfect emulation, not to the fastest emulation..Umm, don't the "Saturn-specific" emulators like Satourne and Saturnin support ST-V as well (or are going to)? Probably with much better speed? Now granted I'm not saying they're going to fly, but as has already been said they do things differently than MAME. MAME just isn't associated with speed. Its deal is compatibility with so many things, its sick.
Listen, mame isn't badly coded. The reason why such games are so slow on mame is because those games are being emulated via an intepreter and not a Dynarec emulation core. Of course an interpreter emulation core means a lot more accurate emulation, but it's very slow. If someone were to make a dynarec core for ST-V games on mame, then the speed and system requirements wouldn't be so unforgiving. Look at the Killer Instinct games. When mame first supported them, they were slow even on 2ghertz systems. Now mame has implemented a new dynarec core for those games making Killer Instinct/KI2 run full speed + sound on 1.4 ghertz system. The same thing could be done to ST-v emulation as well, but it's up to the mame team.
Satourne's ST-V emulation is also done on a dynarec Sh2 emulation. Which is why it's much faster on Satourne than on Mame's interpreter emulation. Anyone remember how slow Satourne was before Fabien coded the dynarec cores for the sh2/vdp?
Another reason why it's slower on Mame is because mame is using pure software emulation for graphics. Satourne actually uses OGL for hardware accellerated video.
Satourne's ST-V emulation is also done on a dynarec Sh2 emulation. Which is why it's much faster on Satourne than on Mame's interpreter emulation. Anyone remember how slow Satourne was before Fabien coded the dynarec cores for the sh2/vdp?
Another reason why it's slower on Mame is because mame is using pure software emulation for graphics. Satourne actually uses OGL for hardware accellerated video.
Runik
Staff member
I'm sorry to say that, but you're wrong.
On the last betas of Satourne, there's no dynarec included, only an interpreter, and this interpreter runs at 60 fps during the bios, and I got between 40 and 50fps in KOF '97 for instance on my Athlon XP 1700+ ...
Sorry but you're wrong again ...
OpenGL is only used to display the 3D, it can't accelerate anything regarding the Saturn (or ST-V) because all the 3D calculations (like matrix rotations etc ...) are done by the sh2s ...
I don't have a beta so I was going by what I've experienced with the Official Satourne releases. I do recall there was a point before Dynarec when Satourne was very slow even on high end systems. I'd say Fabien has done extensive optimizing with the satourne interpreter core if it's that fast. That would mean that his Dynarec core should be even faster?
Anyways, if there is no hardware acceleration being used in satourne, than how can advanced video card hardware features like FSAA be used in satourne? I've played some 3d games with satourne and it definately was using FSAA. Wouldn't there need to be some hardware video processing to enable those hardware features?
I guess ST-V emulation in mame is no where near optimized at the moment. But with Fabien helping the mame team with it, I don't doubt they'll be able to bring those "recommended" specs down a notch or two.
Runik
Staff member
Yes he has, and he's still improving it right now 🙂
But with the last official release (1.0.2P) there was an interpreter plug-in which wasn't bad ...
When the MMX dynarec will be finished, it'll kick ass 😉
FSAA is not used to increase performances, it's only used to have a sharper display. Satourne uses some OpenGL functions to do this, it can only decrease performances but in no way speed the display.
Runik
Staff member
Sure. But it still think that the performance gain is marginal.
Like gouraud shading ? Right now I do the calculation for each pixel.
But I recall that Fabien uses an OpenGL extention for this allowing to separate specular color (with only one pass for a whole part for gouraud shading).
So in this case OpenGL allows to really gain performance I guess 🙂
I should give it a try 😉
I know that he's using some kind of cache system for the VDP2, which should be using some OpenGL functions ...
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